Biblical Hebrew

Biblical Hebrew
Classical Hebrew
שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן‎, יְהוּדִית‎, (לָשׁוֹן) עִבְרִית‎, לְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ‎
Siloam Inscription at Istanbul Archaeological Museum
Region	Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) Kingdom of Judah Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) Hasmonean dynasty Israelite Diaspora (as a liturgical language for Judaism and Samaritanism)
Era	attested from the 10th century BCE; developed into Mishnaic Hebrew after the Jewish–Roman wars in the first century CE
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Central Northwest Canaanite South Biblical Hebrew
Standard forms	Samaritan Mishnaic Hebrew † Medieval Hebrew (Became Modern Hebrew) Babylonian † Ashkenazi Sephardi
Writing system	Proto-Canaanite / Proto-Sinaitic Abjad Paleo-Hebrew Abjad Jewish Abjad Samaritan Abjad
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: hbo – Ancient Jewish Hebrew (Southern dialect) smp – Samaritan Hebrew (Northern dialect)
Linguist List	hbo
	smp
Glottolog	anci1244  Ancient Hebrew sama1313  Samaritan
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Biblical Hebrew (Hebrew: עִבְרִית מִקְרָאִית‎, romanized: ʿiḇrîṯ miqrāʾîṯ (Ivrit Miqra'it)^ⓘ or לְשׁוֹן הַמִּקְרָא‎, ləšôn ham-miqrāʾ (Leshon ha-Miqra)^ⓘ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term ʿiḇrîṯ "Hebrew" was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן‎ śəp̄aṯ kənaʿan "language of Canaan" or יְהוּדִית‎ Yəhûḏîṯ, "Judean", but it was used in Koine Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.^[1]

The Hebrew language is attested in inscriptions from about the 10th century BCE,^[2][3] when it was almost identical to Phoenician and other Canaanite languages, and spoken Hebrew persisted through and beyond the Second Temple period, which ended in the siege of Jerusalem (70 CE). It eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was spoken until the fifth century.

The language of the Hebrew Bible reflects various stages of the Hebrew language in its consonantal skeleton, as well as a vocalization system which was added in the Middle Ages by the Masoretes. There is also some evidence of regional dialectal variation, including differences between Biblical Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel and in the southern Kingdom of Judah. The consonantal text called the Masoretic Text (𝕸) was transmitted in manuscript form and underwent redaction in the Second Temple period, but its earliest portions (parts of Amos, Isaiah, Hosea and Micah) can be dated to the late 8th to early 7th centuries BCE.

Biblical Hebrew has several different writing systems. From around the 12th century BCE until the 6th century BCE, writers employed the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. This was retained by the Samaritans, who use the descendent Samaritan script to this day. However, the Imperial Aramaic alphabet gradually displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet after the Babylonian captivity, and it became the source for the current Hebrew alphabet. These scripts lack letters to represent all of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, although these sounds are reflected in Greek and Latin transcriptions/translations of the time. They initially indicated only consonants, but certain letters, known by the Latin term matres lectionis, became increasingly used to mark vowels. In the Middle Ages, various systems of diacritics were developed to mark the vowels in Hebrew manuscripts; of these, only the Tiberian vocalization is still widely used.

Biblical Hebrew possessed a series of emphatic consonants whose precise articulation is disputed, likely ejective or pharyngealized. Earlier Biblical Hebrew possessed three consonants not distinguished in writing and later merged with other consonants. The stop consonants developed fricative allophones under the influence of Aramaic, and these sounds eventually became marginally phonemic. The pharyngeal and glottal consonants underwent weakening in some regional dialects, as reflected in the modern Samaritan Hebrew reading tradition. The vowel system of Biblical Hebrew changed over time and is reflected differently in the ancient Greek and Latin transcriptions, medieval vocalization systems, and modern reading traditions.

Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic morphology with nonconcatenative morphology, arranging Semitic roots into patterns to form words. Biblical Hebrew distinguished two genders (masculine, feminine), three numbers (singular, plural, and uncommonly, dual). Verbs were marked for voice and mood, and had two conjugations which may have indicated aspect and/or tense (a matter of debate). The tense or aspect of verbs was also influenced by the conjunction ו, in the so-called waw-consecutive construction. Unlike modern Hebrew, the default word order for biblical Hebrew was verb–subject–object, and verbs were inflected for the number, gender, and person of their subject. Pronominal suffixes could be appended to verbs (to indicate object) or nouns (to indicate possession), and nouns had special construct states for use in possessive constructions.